Creating your own Webradio “app” for the N900 on Maemo5

Just came across this “App” here that enables your N900 to play the FM4 Webradio stream via a tiny little icon on the smartphone’s desktop. Like most apps, there is really not much magic involved.

I had a look into the Debian package used to install this austrian radiostation‘s App. If you have the extras-devel and/or -testing repositories enabled on your phone (either via Program Manager or by editing sources.list), then an apt-cache search webradio will give you this:

As you can see, I did’nt even have to worry about in which pocket or trouser I left the phone yesterday evening… Back home, it automatically connects to my WLAN, and via OpenSSH I can connect. I added bash and some aliases to the “~.bashrc“, just like I am used to on a PC. Apts is my alias for apt-cache search, and a simple apt-get install webradio-fm4 adds those files to the phone:

Nokia-N900:~# dpkg -L webradio-fm4

/.

/usr

/usr/share

/usr/share/doc

/usr/share/doc/webradio-fm4

/usr/share/doc/webradio-fm4/changelog.gz

/usr/share/doc/webradio-fm4/copyright

/usr/share/applications

/usr/share/applications/hildon

/usr/share/applications/hildon/webradio-fm4.desktop

/usr/share/icons

/usr/share/icons/hicolor

/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48×48

/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48×48/hildon

/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48×48/hildon/wr-fm4.png

Nokia-N900:~#

Yes, the full set of dpkg and apt is available on this phone. Once you had a look into these files, adding another Webradio as an Icon to your Desktop – or as the Mac and Android people would call it – an “App“, is pretty straightforward: Just copy, rename and edit /usr/share/applications/hildon/webradio-fm4.desktop and adapt it to your needs:

You only need to change the URL of the webcast in the line “Exec” and probably you would want to change the name in “Name” and “Comment”. I added another Icon in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48×48/hildon/ and pointed the line starting with “Icon” to that file. Opening, Copying and Editing the icon image (a 48×48 pixel sized PNG) works fine with Gimp, since the N900’s SSH-Server fully supports the FISH-Protocol integrated in Konqueror and Dolphin. The app now is available in the programm menu and as a widget for the desktop.

My next step will be finding out about recording music from services like shoutcast and last.fm or video recording from flash sources with the N900. The 32 GByte of internal memory must be filled somehow🙂. By the way: there were already about 100 webradiostations preconfigured with my device, and Mplayer is available – so the recording shouldn’t be that difficult. And flash works fine, even webtv works – if you keep the resolution down. Hail to all the apple fans, and thank god there’s no need for I-tunes in this world – except for dummies.